Andy would bicycle across town, in the rain, to bring you candy…

A long time ago, “The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side” by the Magnetic Fields was put on a mix with a purple cover and a little drawing of a mailbox. Awww. That mix was given to me by B., who at the time was just one of those non-platonic late-night friends with whom I played Scrabble and saw when my boyfriend wasn’t around. The fact that the mix also went to B.’s long-distance girlfriend didn’t really matter – that was part of the sweet, sweet don’t-need-to-care package. I knew that song was for me. I read between the lines of a whole bunch of other songs that I hated, liked, or ignored with a passion, laughing at him for being so earnestly nerdy about sucky music.

A year later B. was gone. He was in Cleveland helping dispense justice and fooling around with retail clerks and I was in Philly having a year of apathy and weight loss. I was given 69 Love Songs by a hopeful nutjob and swayed extra hard to the mean songs. When I heard “The Luckiest Guy” I would imagine driving around with B., windows down and things left unsaid. Then I would write him a letter wishing him well.

When he returned, his musical tastes had changed and I had only a craptacular stereo with which to inflict Dreamboat Annie on him. We had a fun year figuring each other out, doing the nasty and – whoops! – falling in love. Then my brother fell asleep at the wheel of my Dad’s old Toyota, killing himself and psychically wounding his passenger, our parents, and me. Forever. All of a sudden I was really fucking old, a zombie with a bachelor’s degree to finish. By that fall B. was my boyfriend-for-real, but he had to leave again, so I was the long-distance girlfriend, weeping, angry, and paralyzed. That was almost three years ago.

The last time I heard “The Luckiest Guy” was last summer, as B. and I were road-tripping to Montreal. I was busy trying to remember some French from the high school classes I had barely passed when the strummy strum of “The Luckiest Guy” rang through the rental car speakers. I must have brought it along for romance’s sake. I burst into tears. But who ruined that song for me? Was it my boyfriend, for somehow turning himself into a serious love? Was it my brother, for so rudely depriving me of the chance to be a sister and a normal human being? I think it was just that ever-present specter Time, you know, that asshole who made my eyes all baggy and keeps promising to help me forget.